Lucca, an exhibition on Otto Hofmann at the Ragghianti Foundation: the first in Italy for 15 years

From May 3 to July 14, 2024, the Fondazione Ragghianti in Lucca presents, with the support of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca, a retrospective exhibition entitled Otto Hofmann European Artist. From Bauhaus to Italy. The exhibition is dedicated to German artist Otto Hofmann (Essen, 1907 - Pompeiana, 1996), which can be visited in the rooms of the San Micheletto Monumental Complex in Lucca. The exhibition, curated by Paolo Bolpagni and Giovanni Battista Martini, is the first dedicated to Otto Hofmann in our country in about 15 years, and documents his entire artistic activity with watercolors, woodcuts and lithographs. The exhibition opens with works created at the Bauhaus, where Hofmann was a student of Klee, Kandinsky, Albers, Schlemmer, Schmidt, Meyer and Scheper. Also on display will be Hofmann’s illustrated notebooks of classes taught by Klee and Kandinsky between1928 and 1930, as well as a record of his teachers’ correspondences and the diploma he earned at the school founded by Gropius. There is also no shortage of watercolors dedicated to his imprisonment in Russia in the period between 1940-1946.

In addition to this, both the works created in the immediate post-war period upon his return to Thuringia from Russia and those executed when he resumed his career as a painter, ceramist, designer and academy teacher, alternating long stays in Belgium, France and Italy, are exhibited. Finally, the exhibition devotes ample space to works executed during Hofmann’s 20-year stay in Pompeiana, in the quiet of the Ligurian hinterland, where he lived his last years. An Italian-language catalog, Edizioni Fondazione Ragghianti Studi sull’arte, containing reproductions of all the works on display, images of photographs, documents, the curators’ texts and a contribution by art critic and historian Chiara Gatti, is being produced for the occasion.

“The Fondazione Ragghianti is organizing a retrospective on Otto Hofmann, an artist to whom an exhibition had not been dedicated in our country for about fifteen years, and which allows us to delve into the characteristics of abstractionism, which, as Kandinsky wrote, ’is the most difficult of all arts,’” commented Paolo Bolpagni, director of the Fondazione Ragghianti and co-curator of the exhibition. “Studying the figure of Hofmann also provides an opportunity to talk about the extraordinary laboratory of modernity that was the Bauhaus. In the spirit of study and in-depth analysis that has always distinguished the Ragghianti Foundation, numerous unpublished works and documents will be on display, particularly related to the period when he attended the Bauhaus, such as his notebooks of Kandinsky and Klee lectures, and the very rare diploma, objects of study of great value.”

“Also many and valuable,” adds Giovanni Battista Martini, co-curator of the exhibition, “are the unpublished accounts of the period Hofmann spent in captivity in Russia, watercolors characterized by an unexpected explosion of color, which, in addition to the significance of historical documentation and aesthetic content, bring to light the artist’s most deeply human aspect.”

Lucca, an exhibition on Otto Hofmann at the Ragghianti Foundation: the first in Italy for 15 years

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